THE POWER of a MELANCHOLY HUMOUR’1 Divination and Divine Tears
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150 ‘THE POWER OF A MELANCHOLY HUMOUR’1 Divination and Divine Tears Angela Voss (University of Kent) The sixteenth-century magus Cornelius Agrippa, in his comprehensive Three Books on Occult Philosophy, observes: [the melancholy humour] when it is stirred up, burns and stirs up a madness conducing to knowledge and divination, especially if it is helped by any celestial influx, particularly of Saturn … By melancholy saith [Aristotle], some men are made as it were divine, foretelling things to come, and some men are made poets.2 In this paper I shall explore the connections between the physiological condition of melancholy and the possession of divinatory knowledge, via the development of the idea of philosophical ‘genius’ which arose in the work of the fifteenth-century Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino. Ficino’s revival of neoplatonic and Hermetic cosmology and magic within a Christian context was to inform, on many levels, the music, art and literature of the Elizabethan Renaissance, and I would like to trace this influence in particular on the composer John Dowland. Dowland’s appropriation of the persona of the melancholic artist does, I suggest, have far deeper implications than mere conceit or the indulgence of a world-weary personality, and to explore these we will take a multi-levelled approach and evoke the ‘image of melancholy’ through physiological, mythological, astrological, magical and metaphysical contexts. I will conclude that there can be no one definitive interpretation of Dowland’s musical jewel Lachrimae, and that the depth and power of its musical symbolism point to more profound dimensions of reality than even the composer himself may have envisioned. The melancholic humour Firstly, what do we mean by melancholy? The categorisation of the four humours is attributed to Hippocrates (fifth-fourth centuries BCE) who, through close examination of blood, deduced four conditions or substances within it: phlegm, black bile, yellow bile and blood itself.3 Each of these gave rise to a physiological temperament: phlegmatic, melancholic, choleric and sanguine, which then became the basis of medical diagnosis and prescription. An imbalance of any humour would give rise to an exaggerated display of its characteristics in the personality, thus too much black bile - which was considered to be cold, dry and heavy in quality - would result in groundless depression, sluggishness and mental disorder. If overheated, however, it would produce a madness or frenzy and a breaking out of sores. Aristotle, in his Problems, asks why it is that outstanding philosophers, statesmen, poets or artists (or heroes such as Heracles, Lysander, Ajax and Bellepheron) are of a melancholic temperament, or even “infected by the diseases arising 1 C. Agrippa, Three Books on Occult Philosophy (De occulta philosophia, 1st ed. Antwerp, 1531), ed. Donald Tyson, trans. J. Freake (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1997), LX, 188. 2 Ibid. 3 See Hippocrates, Nature of Man, Regimen in Health, Humors, Aphorisms, Regimen 1-3, Dreams trans. W.H.S. Jones (Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1931). 151 from black bile”.4 The idea arises here that black bile causes a super-human quality to manifest when it is heated excessively, an eruption of mental acuity, passion or desire which ‘shifts’ the consciousness to another level of insight: Those in whom the bile is considerable and cold become sluggish and stupid, while those with whom it is excessive and hot become mad, clever or amorous and easily moved to passion or desire, and some become more talkative. But many, because this heat is near to the seat of the mind, are affected by the diseases of madness or frenzy, which accounts for the Sybils, soothsayers, and all inspired persons.5 Even those with “moderately heated” black bile, says Aristotle, are “superior to the rest of the world in many ways”,6 chiefly through their acute intelligence. Thus black bile has two effects: if excessive, it will weigh the body down, force the mind into the body and lead to despondency. On the other hand, if it is not stable it may combust and lead to outbursts of mania. The remedy would be to rarefy the bile with moisture derived from phlegm and blood, and to temper and refine it through the use of specific foods, remedies and healthy regimes. When harmoniously tempered, the black bile was seen to produce a capacity for an understanding of a particular kind – one more penetrating than that produced by the other three humours. Why would this be? We will return to this question a little later. Divine frenzy It was Plato who established the spiritual potential of the ‘frenzied’ condition, in suggesting that in such an altered state of consciousness it was possible to become a channel for the influx of divine knowledge. Through the observation of four contexts in which such madness manifested - religious ritual, poetic inspiration, erotic love and prophetic utterance - he transformed a pathology into a “gift of heaven”7 as it enabled the individual to transcend the human condition and lift his or her mind to the level of the gods - in effect, to ‘realise’ their innate divine nature. The Platonists insisted on the distinction between this ‘divine-sent’ madness which led to inspiration or ecstasy and a derangement of mental faculties which was of purely human physiological or psychological origins and led to insanity.8 The near-identity of the words manike (madness) and mantike (prophetic divination) proved, for Plato, their common etymological origins and therefore the essential and prerequisite condition for both foresight and artistic genius which could never be derived from merely human talents: But he who, having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art – he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.9 4 Aristotle, Problems 30.1, translation in J. Radden (ed.), The Nature of Melancholy from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch.1, 57. 5 Ibid, 58. 6 Ibid. 7 Plato, Phaedrus 244. 8 For example, Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2.104, III.25.158, 5-159,13; See Emma C. Clarke, Iamblichus’ De mysteriis: A Manifesto of the Miraculous (Ashgate 2001), 75-8; Gregory Shaw, ‘Containing Ecstasy: The Strategies of Iamblichean Theurgy’ in Dionysius vol. XXI, Dec. 2003, 54-88. 9 Plato, Phaedrus 244. 152 This state of divine possession - the enraptured performer who was both man and god - was to take hold of the Renaissance imagination and lift the status of poetry and music to unprecedented heights; for if music could embody divine qualities, it could have the effect of raising the listener’s soul to a similar ecstatic union through sympathetic resonance. Saturn It became commonplace in Medieval and Renaissance literature to associate the planet Saturn with the melancholic humour, as if he were ‘to blame’ for it.10 The correspondence between humours and planets was established by Arabic astrologers such as Abu’ Mashar (died 885 CE) who associated stars, elements, humours and colours through their analogical qualities, in the tradition of neoplatonic and Hermetic magical practice. In the tenth century Arabic text Faithful of Basra we read: The spleen occupies the same position in the body as Saturn in the world. For Saturn with its rays sends forth transcendent powers which penetrate into every part of the world. Through these, forms adhere to, and remain in, matter. Even so goes forth from the spleen the power of the black bile, which is cold and dry and it flows with the blood through the veins into every part of the body, and through it the blood coagulates and the parts adhere to one another.11 Such correspondences formed the basis of both medical and magical procedures, and were based on obvious correlations between traditional astrological symbolism and ‘literal’ observation. Bile is black, cold and dry like the earth – Saturn, ruling matter, is also cold (being far from the Sun), slow in its revolutions and dark in colour. Similarly, Mars ruled the choleric, Jupiter the sanguine, and the Moon the phlegmatic temperaments. In classical astrology, as it was established by Ptolemy12 and affiliated to an Aristotelian ‘natural scientific’ framework, planets were seen to influence human life causally and directly, and so we find Saturn ‘making’ the individual unlucky, lonely, miserly and selfish if prominent in particular places in a nativity.13 Yet the Roman Saturn was originally wholly good, the guardian of wealth and god of farming, and it is only when we go back to his mythological origins as the Greek Kronos that we begin to observe an internal ambivalence which lies at the roots of his nature.14 As the authors of Saturn and Melancholy observe, Kronos, in Homer and Hesiod, is a god of opposites; according to Homer, Kronos as father of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades is “great” but also “of crooked counsel”. He is the benevolent god of agriculture, ruler of the Golden Age, but also a gloomy, dethroned solitary god, “exiled beneath the earth and the flood of the seas”. He is the father of gods and men, but also the devourer of his own children.15 To summarise Robert Graves’ account,16 Kronos was a Titan, fathered by Uranus upon Mother Earth, after he had thrown his rebellious sons the Cyclopes into Tartarus. In revenge, Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father, led by Kronos who castrated him with a flint sickle as he slept, throwing the genitals into the sea with his left hand. This act 10 Noted by R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky & F.